Menthol cigarettes: How they're being used by and marketed towards African Americans

Here’s a scary statistic, included in a recently published Newsweekarticle: “Each year, smoking-related illnesses kill more black Americans than AIDS, car crashes, murders and drug and alcohol abuse combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).” And then there’s this: “More than four in five black smokers choose menthol cigarettes, a far higher proportion than for other groups… By mitigating the harshness of cigarettes and numbing the throat, menthol makes smoking more palatable, easier to start – and harder to quit.”

The article discusses advocates’ call for a ban on menthol cigarettes (all other flavored cigarettes were banned in 2009) before going on to describe the history of African Americans and menthol-cigarette use, and tobacco companies’ aggressive marketing tactics. (“The tobacco industry… positioned itself as an ally of the very community it was seducing,” writes Abigail Jones.) It also quotes Stanford’s Robert Jackler, MD, founder of Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, who expresses his concerns with ads that appear in a prominent African-American publication:

…[Jackler] has analyzed Ebony magazines since the 1940s and discovered it ran 59 cigarette ads in 1990, 10 in 2011 and 19 last year.

Ebony published 21 articles about breast cancer and 11 about prostate cancer between 1999 and 2013 but did not publish a single full-length story on lung cancer in that 15-year period. “Tobacco advertising is a huge revenue stream,” says Jackler. “Ebony professes itself to be the so-called ‘heart and soul and voice of the African-American community,’ and it completely neglects smoking.”